Exchange with Milo Fine (iii): "a smattering of constants"

[Previously: Foreword – (i) – (ii)]

[SK] The delivery of a consistent product does seem to be a non-negotiable demand of "careerism," no matter the stated (or unstated) stylistic orientation of the artist.

[MF] Keeping in mind, of course, that a hype-driven image, leaning, naturally, towards the faux provocative, is more important than the consistency of the product.

Even a panoply of pop music styles doesn't fly; like a restaurant chef, unpredictability gets you canned.

Well, that sort of thing *is* possible. There are any number of pop musicians who have "reinvented" themselves successfully.

For all the tiresome rehashing of inherent conflicts between artistry and the marketplace, I wonder if this one actually shouldn't be talked about more than it is?

Absolutely. But that might get us to something like a truth, and so, is willfully avoided.

We are, collectively, so not yet beyond style, no matter what people say in their bios.

Generally, yes. But, on the other hand, there is a growing pervasiveness in the blurring of style; a sort of New World Arts Order; an attempt to bring everyone together under a specious pastiche-stained umbrella. Obviously, this is not being beyond style.

When I was younger, I myself became quite frustrated with any number of current jazz players I had heard once in some particular context I enjoyed, only to find it was all they'd ever done in that vein. The opposite, though, can also be galling: personally, I think the world of Brad Mehldau as a player, but I hear almost no evolution across his body of work. In my mind, the inner circle will always be reserved for the Ligetis and Coltranes, i.e. those whose quality control is impeccable throughout substantial artistic evolutions.

This is something for which I also have the utmost respect, though, on the other hand, the production of even one small body of work, or a single piece with resonance is admirable. Not everyone has the wherewithal to sustain the spirit, though, goddamn-it, more could at least make the effort!

There is a book by economist David Galenson, which I recommend, called Old Masters and Young Geniuses which makes something of an empirical study of these two types of artists across several disciplines, drawing some compelling conclusions. (Equally interesting: he neglects to take on music directly.)

I'll make a note of that, though the stack is pretty thick and time is running out.

Your reticence regarding fixed lists of favorites is, though it foils a potentially juicy piece of bloggerel, timely in and of itself.

Well, as I said in an interview with Pamela (Espeland) some years ago, in those cases, 'Either you talk about all the people that everybody talks about, the pantheon; or, you start bringing up all the arcane people, showing how hip you are.' To be clear, there are people who's oeuvre is impressively consistent. If you keep pressing, I *might* go there.

[Milo adds later: Another issue in my reluctance has to do with the fact that there are any number of people doing significant work who have little or no public presence; people of whom I am, naturally, unaware. Thus, my disinclination to make a public list is, in part, a gesture of respect to bodies of work relegated, by choice and/or design, to the shadows.]

There is a lot of talk right now, and there has been for some time, of purging essentialist notions of transcendence/timelessness from our musical culture.

An excuse for mediocrity; especially if there's *just* enough faux transcendence/timelessness to get it over with its target audience.

My personal take (subject, I suppose, to the same vicissitudes as musical taste itself) is that the more ardent proponents of this deconstruction have gone a bit overboard. (I mean, getting back to co-optation for a second, have pop songwriters and middlebrow film composers not mined the Well-Tempered Clavier at least as thoroughly as navel-gazing academics have?)

More troublesome is the fact that this shit satiates the appetite of the "masses" in general, and, in too many cases, the so-called arts consumer as well.

Certainly it figures that any given artwork needs some...good luck? on its side, no matter its internal qualities, to still be receiving any attention whatsoever centuries after its creation. I'm fine with maintaining a healthy suspicion toward the motivations/ideologies which enable this.

The old cliche about being in the right place at the right time certainly holds true. And your suspicions are certainly well-founded. The nature of history is suspect; who is reported on and why. I've remarked elsewhere on the fact that in order for a person to be credited and acknowledged, they have to have a degree of cultural/social visibility. Plus, no *one* person invents anything; it's always a matter of the collective unconscious and the manifestation of an idea via particular electrical/chemical conduits (i.e.; humans).

But, let's face it, at some point there will be no "humanity". So the notion that something is still revered after centuries is ultimately a moot point.

It's also healthy (necessary?) to acknowledge our own fickleness by...I don't know, how we name our blogs? Nothing is absolute here. You, however, are older and more experienced than I am, and I simply wondered if by this time you might have noted a smattering of constants among your (stunning) record collection? Actually, I know you have in *other* areas; but what you say about commercial music is so obviously true.

But, to be my own devil's advocate -- a role I often play -- concerning pop music, I can accede to the fact that a percentage of musicians working in commercial fields have a certain earnestness; at least for a time. But, overall, any distinction/creative impulse is quickly lost due to the nature of the activity; a sort of inherent gravitation to a lowest common denominator; a sinkhole effect that one also finds in jazz, classical music, and, yes, improvised music as well; particularly when other sensibilities are embraced in order to gain acceptance. (See previous Musil quote.)

"A smattering of constants" among my record collection is an extremely apt description. I have been let down by so many artists who, over time, have not maintained that creative fire that initially drew me to them. But, I do so love being surprised when some inconsistent cat releases something of note. The fact that someone can still rise to the occasion is admirable.

For me, at least, it's equally true of very "accessible" jazz and classical music: I own exactly one Keith Jarrett Standards Trio record, which I at first thought could never be enough, but quickly became convinced is probably just the right number.

One too many, I'd say.

Conversely, one of my very favorite records (or music of any kind) is the album Miles Smiles. I'm comfortable extrapolating from my first dozen or so years spent with that record that it is, for me, "timeless," and not just because it seems to appeal to me in virtually any mood, environment, or other harbinger of fickleness, but because I notice something new every time I listen. Such a cliche, I know, but for me there's no other record I've had quite the ongoing journey of newfound realizations about as with this one. Surely you have a few of those, no? (You don't have to name them.)

Easier to pinpoint when I was young(er) and had fewer records! With the sheer volume comes a sort of diffusion. And, to be honest, with so much stuff being available (and so much of it being sub-par), combined with my having a fairly extensive library, plus auditing my own ongoing work, I simply don't seek out material the way I used to. That said, there are certainly works that are near and dear to me; evoking a sense memory of where I was at when I first heard them and the inspiration they provided concerning finding my own voice. (Ironically this phenomena is similar to what the so-called average consumer calls "the soundtrack of my life" vis a vis pop songs.)

Finally, if I'm not being too dense in asking, I'd love for you to expand upon your use of the term "resonance" throughout the last dispatch, particularly regarding that of "work" versus that of "daily life." I can think of a few specific aspects you might be getting at, and I suspect you mean to get at all of them, but I'm not totally sure. Certainly I too have known people to say and do completely different things, to claim a music or artist or era is "so totally important" to them, but to concurrently admit that they more or less abandoned it when they graduated music school. (It's usually something "out," for which something "in" has been swapped; coincidence, then, that this happens for so many people upon entry into the so-called "real world?") If you mean to draw a more direct (i.e. allegorical) connection between art and life here, I'd benefit from some fleshing out of that notion. Something tells me your use of the term is not simply decorative.

Of course you're not being dense! I use the word "resonance", but one could substitute "transcendence", or even "depth". The problem, of course, is that words have, for a long time, been thoroughly misappropriated and thus, used up. But, words are all we've got, so we keep pissing into the wind. While subjectivity always plays a (too often unfortunate) part, I think -- and please pardon my willful naivety and idealism -- if people were to experience music, painting, sculpture, etc. in an open, less conditioned manner, there would be a sort of consensus as to what constitutes a work with "resonance". In any case, resonance is, to me, readily apparent, and is something to be striven for. (Aside: over the years, as I've gotten to know younger people, I make recommendations as to what to check out and what to avoid. Inevitably, people will challenge my choices, and, almost without exception, they find out that my sensibilities are uncannily spot-on. But this "ability" is really nothing special; more a matter of discernment; of perceiving with resonance.) And, if one can touch that in one's work, can it not be striven for and applied in one's life? The done-to-death tortured (and/or crazy) asshole artist stereotype is still an extremely viable marketing ploy. And, as with most stereotypes, there is truth to it. But, it is ultimately tiresome; as is the newer image of artist-businessperson. For example, by all accounts, John Coltrane was nearly a saint, in the best sense of the term; what he learned from sound he brought to his life, and vice versa. This is what I'm getting at. As for what you describe in people abandoning something important to them, this is simply a succumbing of sorts. At some point, they touch something "resonant", but as personal/societal/cultural pressures come to bear they sadly, if predictably acquiesce to the sickness of status quo. Easier to abandon than to struggle at that level.

Exchange with Milo Fine (i): "illuminating another course of action"

[Previously: Foreword]

[SK] So, I didn't have to read too far before a conversation starter presented itself:

"[The New Riverside Cafe in Minneapolis] was a venue in the heart of what was, for many years, an enclave of the hippie/counterculture movement. Getting a gig there...was, however, curiously difficult [for avant-garde musicians], in no small part due to the fact that so-called social progressives, then, as well as now, were unable to see that vital flaws in the value system of the status quo stood at its core, i.e., the nature and application of sound, and thus weren't all that interested in presenting/supporting music which undermined, or at least, challenged fundamental cultural assumptions."

Reading this, I am reminded (I've had the thought before) that you and I have never had a knock-down-drag-out over "what it all means," i.e. what music can accomplish beyond itself, its place in society, its role in political movements, etc. Perhaps we have talked about it tangentially, but not overtly, I don't think.

[MF] So-called "breakthroughs" or "new" developments in the arts -- which are, in the final analysis nothing but an ongoing evolution (everything being predicated on what precedes it) -- generally foretell shifts in the social/cultural/political fabric. But, of course, by the time those shifts are manifest, they are, overall, absorbed by the status quo. (As I am often wont to intone, the status quo is an insatiable beast that uses everything to its own advantage.) Put another way, arts are the harbinger of (human) potential. So, while the theoretical/technical aspects of any developments in aesthetic endeavor will be dumbed down, diluted and put in the service of the lowest common denominator, an individual focusing in on this, what?, energy can, I believe, internalize and nurture it to lend it a deeper resonance, and, from there, interject a necessary (and genuinely) subversive element to the collective unconscious. An element which is, of course, also a part of the status quo; and yet, in the best circumstance, not. (Another way to look at it is that the accumulation of such element[s] could serve to stretch the status quo, or, better yet, create a boil or tumor with the potential of infecting it.)

You have told me, more than once, about the sense which permeated your formative years, circa the late 1960s, that "anything was possible," and about how widely shared that belief/sensation/perception was among those who were there. (Everyone?) I sense, however, that much has gone unsaid in our conversations on this.

Yes, it was widely shared, but certainly not by conservatives and reactionaries! And, being it was "in the air", a lot of people were just along for the ride. Manifestations in music were rooted in free jazz (predicated in some ways by contemporary classical music), and, of course, what with youthful hormones (always ripe for faux revolution) and a fertile marketplace, rock; which, has, generally been a more or less parasitic music. But, naturally, it didn't take long for the opportunists, careerists, bureaucrats, businesspeople, etc. to start to exploit and manipulate the situation in the name of commerce and a higher position in a developing hierarchy. "Anything was possible", but, sadly, much, for wont of a better word, genuine individual initiative -- doing the work out of a more or less pure necessity -- was once again overall (and inevitably) subsumed by the status quo paradigm. That said, it was, for me anyway, a wonderful time to come of age. Disillusionment set in when I figured out that very few people really gave a shit as to what really *was* possible; that a meaningful cultural/societal shift was not going to happen. But, that bolstered my resolve to attempt to carry that spirit forward.

To me at least, the notion of getting "elsewhere," to "der andere zustand/the other condition"¹ or wherever, is very nearly self-evident in your work.

Thank you.

In the broadest terms, I think the justification is equally self-evident: to show the world as it might be rather than what it merely is.

Exactly. And what's also self-evident is there's no formula nor map nor rules nor dogma. (However, there are, from time-to-time, suggestions predicated on habitual behavior; suggestions which, as far as I'm concerned, can come from anyone in any given ensemble.)

To confess, though, I've always been rather skeptical of the notion of music as a vehicle for social or political change (and as I use those words, I'm sure you have plenty to say about the co-optation of this narrative by a mainstream for which they are indeed nothing more than words; but bear with me as they are the most widely understood shorthand for what I wish to refer to).

See above, to which I would add that experience/observation has made me extremely cynical and skeptical. In a relatively recent conversation with Paul Metzger and Elaine Evans, I clearly identified components of my personality which define what, for me, is a curious affect. I was a loving, compassionate, gregarious child and young man. That's still there, but there is an overlay of cynicism and skepticism; all of which inform how I interact with people. I often feel I come across as awkwardly gracious, particularly with people who I don't know all that well. (As I'm sure you'll attest, however, once I get to know you, all bets are off!)

There are many, many angles from which to approach this topic, and I'm not sure they are all equally relevant to your work: for example, you have never been interested in the sheer number of people you are able to reach, which is a necessary condition for success at your chosen task, yet ensures that its impact is limited.

Depends on one's definition of "impact." One does work (lives), energy is released, and goes out into the world/cosmos. The attendance numbers are almost irrelevant, except for what they bring to the music; particularly those who are active/engaged listeners; that are there to impact the music as much as it impacts them.

The lowest hanging fruit here for the cynic, however, is the constancy of so many social and political problems, certainly over the last 50-some years, but no less across centuries during which art has changed immeasurably.

I sadly agree. Art, in the best sense, just keeps illuminating another course of action. Humanity (and artists!) seldom, if ever, follow through.

One thing that certainly has not changed, as you allude to above, is this compartmentalization of agendas by "so-called social progressives." This was already on my mind because it is, you will not be shocked to learn, very much in evidence among the students at CalArts. I had a visual artist roommate last year who would cry bloody murder if someone missed some subtlety in a piece of his, but also if a piece of music lasted more than a couple of minutes. More disturbing yet, to me at least, is the notion that because pop music was for so long not taken seriously by classical musicians or scholars that playing pop music in art music situations or making an academic study of it is somehow deeply subversive.

What a fucking tool, this roommate of yours! To so obviously succumb to the short attention span plague.

As for the aggrandizement of pop music, well, I first became aware of that when, as a young teenager involved in rock, I read THE AGE OF ROCK, a book consisting of quasi-intellectual essays that were pretty specious overall. It's called pop for a reason. I put this in an interview 14 years ago: “Pop music, by its very nature, feeds on the deeper streams of creativity, and by its very nature, which is parasitical, it doesn’t do those streams justice.”

As for pop music in the academy being subversive, what an asinine contention! What you have with pop and the academy is mutual exploitation. The academy co-opts rock to reach more people (get more enrollees), while rock co-opts the academy to adopt a sheen of legitimacy/respectability.

In the larger picture, this type of pervasive commingling exemplifies something Robert Musil -- likely my favorite author -- predicted for the later 20th century (and is a sort of blueprint for so-called postmodernism) in THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES (likely my favorite book):

"Ideas that had once been of lean account grew fat. Persons who had previously not been taken altogether seriously now acquired fame. What had been harsh, mellowed down, what had been separated, re-united, those who had been independent made concessions for the sake of public approval, and established taste fell, a prey to new uncertainties. Sharp borderlines everywhere became blurred, and some new, indescribable capacity for entering into hitherto unheard-of relationships threw up new people and new ideas. These people and ideas were not wicked. No, far from it. It was only that the good was adulterated with a little too much of the bad, the truth with error, and the meaning with a little too much of the spirit of accommodation."

In line with that, from the same book:

"And, after all, if stupidity did not, when seen from within, look so exactly like talent as to be mistaken for it, and if it could not, when seen from outside, appear as progress, genius, hope, and improvement, doubtless no one would want to be stupid, and there would be no stupidity, or at least it would be very easy to combat it. But unfortunately, there is something very winning and natural about it …The long and short of it is, there is no important idea that stupidity does not know how to make use of, for it can move in all directions and is able to wear all garment of truth. Truth, on the other hand, has only one garment and one road and is always at a disadvantage."

(translated from the German by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser)

What all of this suggests is that there certainly is ample work left to be done awakening people to the possibilities and implications of sound. I do wonder, though, how we can go on implying a higher purpose for that work only to dance away from such implications when things don't change?

See above, plus, I should note, reitering something previous, any change, however small, is *internal*, and radiates from there. It's the person in the mirror who provides the biggest challenge/the largest hurdle to substantive change; the individual against oneself (one's conditioning/wiring). *That* is the fecund (and *only*) ground where meaningful revolution can occur.

For me, establishing this maneuver in the lexicon of careerist artists everywhere is the ultimate "thanks but no thanks" legacy of 1960s art-thought: an irreverence for specifics, a desire to no longer be hemmed in by rationalism, and a faith,

Not sure what you're getting at…

therefore, you might say, that justification for any particular endeavor will emerge from all the good vibes seem to me to be defining characteristics of the era which younger generations, seldom for the right reasons (though I do believe those exist) glommed onto in droves.

But with that, I concur. Though these droves are simply echoes of many earlier droves. I do however wonder, with the sheer number of people on the planet now, to say nothing of technological acceleration, whether there can ever be another substantial drove, or whether all is now (and from here on in will be) reduced to subsets.

You've kept the faith admirably through all of this as few people would or could,

This means more to me than you might imagine. The genuineness of the sentiment helps fuel the next heartbeat, the next breath, the next step.

and I'm sure I've written enough at this juncture to engender some lively discussion. So have at it.

Just did! :-)

---

¹A phrase/concept drawn from Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities, which looms large for Milo and is discussed further as the conversation proceeds.

Now-Annual Linkinrunn

Linkinrunn is a Finnish word dating from the eighteenth century, when ironic messages about quotidian local goings on were commonly left in the town square by phantom nocturnal pranksters dragging pieces of chain through the snow. Actually, that's not true at all; it's merely my phonetic rendering of a well-known musicoblogical phenomenon whereby the blogger assembles one or more hyperlinks to online articles of marginal interest which said blogger has read in the recent past and deems worthy of passing on to the next marginally interested reader, but about which they have not the time, nor in most cases the inclination (ability? courtesy?!), to contribute anything original or enlightening of their own to the ongoing dialogue surrounding the topic at hand. This, gentle reader, is to be that, except for the fact that I really did find these blurbs interesting and worth my time, and will say a little bit (or a lot) about each of them as they are divulged. And all of that at no cost or obligation to you. Read on...

Golden Omelets - Jonathan Freilich

Jonathan is a fellow composition student here at CalArts and has written a lengthy but fascinating account of the intersection of the musical, economic and political in post-Katrina New Orleans. His account of the destructive effects, real and potential, of "boosterism" and political favoritism on the musical culture is revealing; in fact, I would say that if you have any interest at all in playing or studying any variety of New Orleans music old or new, it's essential reading. As one such person who nonetheless has found himself at a distance (geographical and otherwise) from "the real shit," it explains a lot; for example, how someone as spectacularly derivative as Evan Christopher can go around saying things like this to the jazz media without any fear of being marginalized:

Espeland: You were working with French musicians?

Christopher: On the Live at the Meridien recording, the drummer’s French. The other two musicians live in France but they’re actually Australian.

The bass player, Sebastien Girardot, has played traditional jazz with real New Orleans-style revival bands since he was 19. [Guitarist] David Blenkhorn came up with Australian musicians in the Australian traditional jazz scene. He plays the shit out of blues. He approaches jazz in almost a more American way than a lot of American musicians do.

Espeland[appropriately!]:What does that mean?

Christopher: He likes to swing and play blues.

Espeland: Do you find there’s a difference between working with American musicians and those who aren’t American?

Christopher: I can’t make a generalization like that. But I will say that I enjoy the spirit of these guys. It seems more American to me than a lot of the cats I work with here.

I'm no flaming patriot, but them's fightin' words anyway. There is, of course, something profoundly contrary to musical Americanism in what Christopher says here, which all jibes quite nicely with the notion of boosterism exported to out-of-the-way places, like Minnesota, where most people won't know the difference.

The Latin Jazz Grammy Travesty - Brian Lynch

I'm late to the party as usual, but if you missed it too, here's an in-depth account of some internecine strife at NARAS (the Grammy people) surrounding the recent consolidation of categories, which included the elimination of Latin Jazz as a standalone. It appears that Lynch himself as well as many of the other Latin Jazz luminaries involved are in fact members of this organization themselves. I can't claim any real understanding of what that means and don't particularly care to research it, but I'm having a devil of a time summoning the least bit of sympathy. Is this not an organization, an industry, a culture built from the very beginning on screwing people over? What has really been accomplished when recognition from such a morally and artistically compromised institution has become so paramount to a musical culture?

One obvious answer, I think, is that it hasn't really, but rather that there is some quite understandable, if predictable, self-interested writhing going on here among the exceedingly few exponents of said musical culture for whom the Grammys matter in the least, either practically or symbolically. I am especially troubled nonetheless by the assertion that ethnic pride is at stake here. Ethnic pride needs to be bigger than the Grammys; it needs to be self-determined and self-evident; it needs to be morally purer than the wretched criminals who run the entertainment industry and the soulless automatons they deploy to town hall meetings to run interference for them. Not that I know anything about ethnic pride, of course, but I'm at least willing to entertain the notion, because what is it that us straight white men hear so often from members of oppressed groups who intend to impress upon us how far we actually are from being post-race but that just because The Man gives out white and black and red and yellow trophies doesn't mean that those people have equal footing in His society; in fact, this may well be a diversionary tactic designed to make this appear to be the case while the injustices continue elsewhere in plain sight.

It is, of course, also highly unfashionable in 2012 to advocate so vociferously both for oneself and for such a narrowly-defined musical genre, more or less regardless of the social context, and so if you feel I'm being unduly-harsh-verging-on-obstrperous above, then allow me to at least point out this more obvious fact and have a good-natured chuckle about it at the expense of some musicians whom I otherwise have a great deal of respect for. I mean, reeeeeally guys? You wouldn't bat an eye if I was out there with a sandwich board agitating for an "Anglo-Jewish Mutt Acoustic Jazz Chamber Music" category and acting as if the future of my music and my people depended on it? If it does, I guess I've got another thing coming.

Irony Plague - Todd Clouser

I'm impressed by Todd's recent writing and thoughts, and as a result, also regretting not crossing paths with him when I was still in Minneapolis. Definitely read the linked NYT article, though, for the full effect. It puts into words so many thoughts I've had over the years in a way that I nonetheless don't yet have the full historical or critical theory-al understanding to articulate intelligently, though you might have noticed that I've tried anyway in fits and starts in this very space. There is what can only be called a psychoanalysis of the ironist conducted both explicitly and implicitly in this article, which I realize now is the way to get to the heart of the issue: postmodern pastiche itself actually fits fairly neatly into a linear art-historical analysis, but ironism specifically cannot really be fully understood this way, I don't think. It's a state of mind, not just a technique, and one doubts if it is unique to the present day so much as the democratization of creativity (which for high-musicological purposes actually started at the end of the eighteenth century, not with the advent of the microchip) actually creates it as a byproduct, leading to an accumulation over the years which has reached a fever pitch in recent decades. If you're an aesthete, ironism is a neurosis, not an art-historical inevitability; good to read a couple of intelligent takedowns, then, as such things tend to keep us aesthetes from also becoming nihilists, if only temporarily.

Suff Daddy

So, I checked out some of the NextBop non-jazz stuff. This guy's okay. I'm going to keep an eye on him. It's funny to me that when I find hip-hop I can actually listen to, it's not usually because of the presence of something that's lacking elsewhere; rather, it's when I get through a whole song without hearing something that makes me vomit that I know I've stumbled on something. That is to say that I like hip-hop and I hate almost all other pop music forms, and that most hip-hop I've sampled is too much like those other pop music forms to hold my interest. I like this, though: no whiny voices, awkward harmonic progressions or amateurish guitar playing, just taut, attractive beats, flow and rhyme striking that elusive balance between clarity and opacity that makes you want to listen to something again. Thanks guys.

Any Lengths of Lasting?

Overheard this afternoon during pre-class chatter:

"The paradigm changes so fast now, you have to make the music today that will be big in six months."

Alternatively, we could aspire to create music which threatens to endure longer than six months.

Second Loves (ii)

Hip-hop is the area of popular music (lower case, broadly construed) that has always piqued my interest disproportionately from all the others. Nailing down what exactly it is that I like about hip-hop and putting those impressions into words carries with it the same myriad pitfalls that accompany that task elsewhere in music, not the least of which is that the term "hip-hop" is general enough to include quite a bit of music I couldn't care less about. The best I can do, I think, is to say that I really like the "time feel" of certain rappers, and that when it serves the words particularly well, I like it even more. Most hip-hop songs, like most vocal jazz, classical art songs, and operas, fall well short of this exalted status, but very occasionally, I hear one that "works" on both levels, and it's threatening to become more than a passing fancy.

Yet I'm at a time in my life and career when even a dabbling side project in hip-hop doesn't make a whole lot of sense. Some colleagues would never speak to me again, others would just chuckle under their breath, and only if I'm lucky would a handful of sympathetic ones actually get my angle on it. But before the social consequences can even be considered, there's the more pressing issue of what to do about the music I've already devoted myself to, which is already an overcommitment and certainly doesn't need a mid-stream transition to a largely foreign style competing with it for time and attention. One solution is to skip the dirty work and simply launch into this new territory with little historical, technical or social perspective on it; everyone knows that's a recipe for disaster, though.

As I ruminate on whether or not to act on any of these impulses, here they are organized quite roughly into four musico-technical areas and given as something of a manifesto, a glimpse of what I might attempt in this realm if the stars were ever to align:

Part 1: Structure
Common-practice hip-hop leaves the most to be desired in the area of structure, and hence, this would seem to me to be where the most fertile ground for experimentation and innovation lies (and indeed, where the need for it is beyond pressing; it's looong overdue). In every hip-hop song I want to like but can't, there's a two bar drum loop to remind me that I'm listening to a commercially packaged product, music that needs to be "memorable" in order to be validated, and where through composition is a vice which merely "distracts" listeners from the all-important text. I see no reason why through-composed hip-hop is any less tenable than through-composed jazz of the kind that Bob Brookmeyer, Maria Schneider and others have made their names with, or for that matter, why the surface elements of a Kurt Elling vocalese couldn't serve as a model for what forward-thinking rappers might fill these new and exciting structures up with.

In other words, someone needs to do for hip-hop what Behold...The Arctopus has done for metal: combine the timbres and time-feels of a pop music style with classical-modernist approaches to tonality, structure and motivic development. Of course, the mainstream pop lemmings have branded Behold... as "the worst band in the world," and one can imagine the mainstream hip-hop crowd reacting similarly to what I'm imagining. This music would be doomed to the kind of narrow appeal that keeps Kyle Gann up at night, but I would stand by my argument that pursuing such directions is both more necessary and more ethically defensible than musical sycophancy.

I shouldn't speak in hypotheticals. I think it's highly unlikely that no one has tried this yet; it's more likely that I just don't know where to find them. (Anyone out there know?) Genre searches on sites like MySpace, CDBaby and eMusic are either not specific enough, or downright misleading. I googled "progressive hip hop" and learned that using *4-bar* drum loops, a few "live" instruments, and making passing references to politics is all it takes to be worthy of that label. No thanks.

Part 2: Materials
As with structure, it's essential that the progressive hip-hop I'm envisioning cast a far wider melodic, harmonic and rhythmic net than today's commercial hip-hop does. A mentor of mine in the jazz area has always been fond of saying that a rhythm section's comping should be interesting enough to listen to on its own without necessarily intruding on what the soloist is trying to do. I can't think of a better admonition in this discussion either, and I think anyone who remembers cassettes with the complete rap song on one side and just the beat on the other will agree that those B sides were a lot less fun to just sit around and listen to than they were to horse around with. Yes, I realize that this is part and parcel of what hip-hop is; I am more concerned, though, with what it might be able to become, which is a hell of a lot more than bashing people over the head with the same sample literally hundreds of times in the span of only a few minutes.

Part 3: Content
I'm sick and tired of reading about how modern classical music, jazz, improvised music, and whatever else the musical populists out there might decide to tar with the modernist brush if they wake up on the wrong side of the bed, are irrelevant because they're too "self-referrential." CHEE-RIST, have any of you sycophants listened to hip-hop lately? If you do, you'll hear a music that literally refers to itself constantly, sung by people who simply cannot stop talking about themselves (and they don't have much to say, either). This is first order self-indulgent "fanservice" if I ever heard it, except the get-out-of-jail-free card otherwise known as the *backbeat* is redeemable for a free pass with any Cultural Studies major that might happen to hear it. So much for the words being more important than the music.

To their credit, at least hip-hop artists can be counted on to venture beyond "Ooh yeah, baby, I love you" with greater regularity than most any other vocal music tradition, popular or classical. Poetry as an art form typically does less than nothing for me, but even so, I'd have to rank the lyrical sophistication of hip-hop pretty high on the list of human cultural accomplishments. There are vast untapped possibilities, though, particularly in the realms of abstraction, nonsense, Dadaism, and scatting. Again, it's a matter of isolating particular elements of timbre and time-feel and importing them to other tonal and structural contexts. And on the rare occasion anyone comes up with a story worth telling to music, that's cool too. It had better be good, though, and if you're the main character, you better have accomplished something besides screwing or shooting somebody, because we've already heard that one a few hundred thousand times.

Part 4: Improvisation
One day about 5 years ago, pretty soon after I had graduated from college, I decided to indulge my curiosity by trying to teach myself to freestyle rap. The idea was as ridiculous then as it is now, but I felt like I had to try, if for no other reason than to gain an appreciation for people who can really do it. Along with hitting a golf ball straight and sight-reading Nick Zielinski's tunes, it's one of the hardest things I've attempted in my life, and predictably, I lost interest within a few weeks. There were a couple of moments of beginners luck, though, where, in the privacy of my car or my bedroom, I rattled off some pretty sick shit, and while I had no illusions that I'd be able to do it consistently without years of practice, there was something addictive about it, something I've never gotten over despite the fact that the sheer oppressive difficulty of it the other 99% of the time was more than enough to scare me away from making any kind of commitment to it. It was obvious that this commitment would preclude the commitments I'd already made to other musical endeavors, and while I've always been a bit restless, blowing everything up and starting over didn't seem all that prescient, especially for something which neither my inherited nor my acquired traits seem to suit me particularly well for.

Even so, I feel like my theory that one could reasonably expect to be able to approach freestyling much the same way instrumental jazz players approach their art is one worth hanging on to. The idea still intrigues me even though I didn't pursue it nearly far enough to be able to validate or refute it conclusively. I did get as far as identifying words whose final syllables were particularly tricky to rhyme and making lists of possible solutions. The harder work of transcribing other songs and perfecting the timing and delivery I didn't have the patience for, and would have been too embarrassed to be heard attempting had anyone walked in. So, I won't be the one to break down the barriers in this area myself, but if I ever meet someone else who can, I'll be champing at the bit to be their musical director.

People who would know better than I do have told me that most rappers can't actually freestyle, and that 99.9% of everything we hear from them is preconceived. That doesn't surprise me if it's true, but I do find it very disappointing. I'd posit that just as listening to Supersax performing a transcribed Charlie Parker solo or a dixieland band playing from a published arrangement are poor substitutes for the real thing, preconceived rapping, while some of it is good, merely scratches the surface of what is musically possible for the genre. The half-assedness of my experiment notwithstanding, I'm willing to bet that by applying some tried-and-true principles from the teaching of other improvisational arts, one could bring about greater overall fluency in freestyle rap, though undoubtedly it would come with the same drawbacks that have surfaced in formalized jazz education (and indeed, they're already giving degrees in Hip-Hop Studies, so we're likely to start experiencing these drawbacks sometime soon if we haven't already).

Yeah, but is it Pop?

I soon realized that in the course of the previous discussion on pop, I omitted an important predilection of mine that happens to come from the pop world, that being Jimi Hendrix. Not that I'm any kind of Hendrix expert, but I do seriously dig his music. I'd venture that Hendrix's appeal is almost as universal as The Beatles', and also that it's more universal than the Beatles' among people who also happen to like atonal, modernist, and/or avant-garde music (whatever that is). If Dan had asked about Hendrix instead of the Beatles, he would have essentially been asking the same thing about me, I think, but he would have gotten a very different (and yes, probably shorter) answer, and that whole discussion would have gone in a completely different direction. Oh well.

For what it's worth, brass quintets, wedding bands, jazz combos, and pops orchestras don't cover Hendrix nearly as excessively as they cover The Beatles. That's no doubt in large part because they also do so far less successfully and they know it. Rock musicians have significantly less shame about imitating Hendrix, though they probably shouldn't. The Beatles certainly had their extramusical trials and tribulations, but perhaps Hendrix's were more well-known as they happened, and more of the kind that aren't typically discussed in polite company. I think all of these things probably factor into why The Beatles's music is seemingly thought to transcend instrumentation the way Bach's does, while Hendrix is just as popular but not covered as often or as well. I'd like to think that I could separate my own unpleasant experiences with poor imitations of an artist from my overall opinion of them, and certainly that I could prevent extramusical issues from coloring that opinion, but I'm human, and that may not be the case here. I really don't know. Gil Evans did an album of Hendrix's music that left me cold (frigid, in fact), but I still dig the original.

Stevie Wonder is an artist that many jazz musicians have covered, from Dave Pietro to Joe Gilman to The New Power Trio to Dan's own group Frankhouse. I'm not so set in my ways that I ignore and deny these kinds of trends. In fact, as I've said, the more pop music I can find that I actually like, the less I'll feel like a social outcast, and that can only be a good thing. And if so many otherwise like-minded people are into something, you'd think that would be a hint worth taking. To that end, I had the chance to investigate a Stevie Wonder box set while housesitting for a friend last year. When I saw it sitting on the rack, I got really excited. This was my chance! Well, I had to stop listening after a while. It just wasn't for me. It's galling in a way, yet not entirely surprising that while I really dig many of the jazz covers of his music that I've heard, I couldn't make it through an entire disc of the originals. Too bad for me, I guess.

I mentioned before that prog rock seems to float my boat. I'm not sure that really counts as pop music, though. Some pop people spew even more venom at prog rock than they do at classical music and jazz. It not only incorporates many elements of those more high-falutin' styles, but also hits closer to home by virtue of still being rooted, if not in some small way, in the rock and/or pop aesthetic(s). I was perusing some blogs that I don't get around to reading all that often and stumbled on a couple of posts over at Acousmata about a couple of prog groups I didn't know about:

Magma

Univers Zero

I dig both of these tracks a lot, and I'll definitely be investigating both of these bands' work more extensively at some point.

It's hard to talk intelligently about structure when you've only listened to something one time, but if there are profound large-scale structural concepts worthy of a classical musicologist's attention at work here, I missed them the first time. In fact, while I definitely dug the Univers Zero track more, the scattered nature of the structure bothered me a bit. That's usually my first and only complaint about the prog bands I'm into, which scares me, because for a long time, I resented the classical approach to form and believed in, essentially, doing what you want in that respect. It's not doing Kyle Gann's writing any sort of justice to lump him in with the clunky statement I just made, but if you read his blog, you know that he's written intelligently and repeatedly about composers (himself included) who have rebelled against such traditional formal strictures. What scares me is that while I nod in agreement when I read things like that, and always have, nonetheless, as I get older and listen to and write more music, I find myself hurtling towards the traditional perspective. It's bizarre.

By virtue of that traditional perspective, my trajectory is wholly unremarkable and quite predictable. Young people don't "get it" because they don't know anything, and once they learn something (if not everything), they see the light. It raises a question that's on the tip of most everyone's tongues these days when the pop and classical worlds collide: is this process an inherently positive, predictable, and universal one by which each and everyone of us can become an astute, structure-oriented listener and musician simply by trying, or does it represent the artificial domestication of the listener, their mere social initiation into a rarefied world of musical elitism where other perspectives are unduly dismissed as too unsophisticated?

I don't have the answer to that. What I do know is that as I gain experience, structure comes to matter more. I'm more aware of it when I listen, and I agonize over it more when I write. In all but the most extreme cases, it's not enough to turn me off entirely from a piece of music that I have only good reactions to otherwise, but I wonder if the current trajectory, assuming it continues, doesn't dictate that sooner or later that will change? That thought scares me a bit, though there's nothing I can do about it. Clinging to previously held beliefs simply to avoid admitting you were wrong is always a bad idea; labeling those who are willing to admit as much as "wishy-washy" also misses the point; and purposely remaining ignorant or cutting oneself off from the learning process when it becomes obvious that this process is changing your long-held beliefs is stooping quite low, dare I say it, in a pop sort of way. That's my philosophy with regard not only to the question of structure, but also of taste. If there's a time in my future when I will worship The Beatles, then so be it.

As a parting shot, check out this band from Vancouver:

Winning

A friend hipped me to them the other night, describing it as "Free Emo." That sounds about right. I could listen to this by myself in a quiet, dark room without getting bored, the same way I listen to Lutoslawski, Ives and Monk. But is it Pop?

Pop State of Mind

I have a student, an unusually talented student in fact, who's involved in equal parts classical and pop. We got into a conversation recently about the difference between the two worlds. I told her the things I've observed about pop musicians over the years, most of which are negative, and asked her if any of that resonated with her experience.

Not only did it resonate, in fact, but she told me something that trumps all of my curmudgeonly bellyaching on the subject. She said that her pop music friends make fun of her for having a teacher, because the only people who have to take lessons are people who are too dumb to figure it out for themselves.

After I picked my jaw up off the floor, we continued talking and I realized that this bothered me a lot more than it bothered her. She's both unusually mature and profoundly gifted, and so the sheer absurdity of such a statement is as obvious to her as it is to me. Needless to say, though, that this experience did nothing to ingratiate me to the pop music world that many of my peers seem to view as the savior of "serious" music.

I have more firsthand experience with classical music and jazz, and certainly those worlds are no strangers to a variety of equally specious assumptions and social ills, though they couldn't be more different in nature. Even so, the militant ignorance of pop musicians has always struck me as a high crime among misdemeanors. If I found the results compelling, I would feel differently.